Toddler Sent To Room While Grownups Talk

Yes, the toddler is the president of the United States, and the grownups are talking about war.

You know how when you’re throwing a dinner party, and while you’re preparing baked salmon and roasted asparagus for your guests, you are also making mac and cheese for the kids and sending them off to eat it in front of the TV in the den because you don’t want them throwing some sort of fit or being annoying to your guests?

Well, imagine the dinner party is the Iran war, the dining room where you serve the salmon and asparagus is the Situation Room, and the president of the United States is the temperamental six-year-old you banish to another room in the house so he won’t embarrass you by loudly farting at the dinner table or asking your friend’s much younger wife what grade she’s in.

The Wall Street Journal didn’t phrase it quite like that, but this story makes it clear that Donald Trump’s staff is at various times trying to conduct his war in Iran while keeping him out of the Situation Room during important meetings, lest he fuck everything up with an angry outburst.

To be technically accurate, the story does not say the Situation Room specifically. Though as Marcie pointed out, the Trump team will make a Situation Room anywhere by, say, slapping up some black curtains around the Mar-a-Lago omelet bar. This is not an administration particularly concerned with information security.

Is it a problem that White House officials have to keep the president far away from any decision-making about a war because his decaying brain now resembles a moldy block of cheese you forgot has been in the back of the refrigerator since 2006? It’s certainly not ideal.

Yet, that’s the opening anecdote of the story: it was the afternoon of Good Friday, and an American F-15 had just been shot down over Iran. Trump spent hours screaming at his aides that the military needed to go in and get the downed pilots immediately. Since the military needed time to actually plan how to do that, the president’s aides gave him a juicebox and sent him to play with his Lincoln Logs or something:

Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments[.]

And well they should be concerned. Both pilots were rescued, Trump went to bed, and six hours later sent out his infamous post warning Iran to “open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards.” It’s all part of his “veering between belligerent and conciliatory approaches” to the Iran war and pretty much everything else.

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The Journal frames all this as if Trump is really wrestling with how to graft his “unorthodox” approach on to the prosecution of this war, and with his fear of getting blamed if American troops die. (Newsflash: that’s part of being the president, dimwit.) This fear is at odds with his normal urge to fire off pronouncements at all hours without informing his national security team.

The Journal seems generally confused. Sometimes, it claims there is a strategy here, that Trump has said seeming “unstable” could push Iran to negotiate:

He said he wanted to seem as unstable and insulting as possible, believing it could bring the Iranians to the table, senior administration officials said. It was a language, he said, the Iranians would understand. But he was also concerned about the fallout. “How’s it playing?” he asked advisers.

The problem with trying to negotiate by scaring the Iranians is that he has done it so many times in so many other contexts that no one has any reason to believe he’d actually do something nuts.

Other times, the Journal can’t seem to decide if this really is all part of a plan or not. The president is alternately belligerent, fearful, executing the old “madman” strategy to frighten the other side into negotiating (or, better yet in his mind, surrendering to his dominating alpha energy), or a doddering idiot being sidelined by his own advisers so he doesn’t make things worse.

The truth is that there is no strategy, because Trump, as has been the case for pretty much the entire decade he’s been taking up way too much space in all our brains, doesn’t have the attention span to institute one. He bounces between pounding his chest and backing down because he’s afraid of flailing around like Jimmy Carter in 1980. (The fact that he’s already gotten more American soldiers killed than Carter did in the infamous Desert One debacle doesn’t seem to enter his brain.) He wants Iran to cave, which would take sustained pressure, but he keeps getting distracted by his ballroom or fundraising for the midterms or wondering if he should award himself the Medal of Honor.

No, really. The Journal says he has been musing that he deserves a Medal of Honor for that one time in his first term when he made a surprise visit to Iraq to visit the troops, and his plane had to descend in the dark to an unlit runway. As is typical of Trump, he thinks he should get the medal and not, you know, the guys who landed the fucking plane.

Meanwhile, negotiations are supposed to start up again in Pakistan to end the war. Trump spent the entire weekend undermining the effort by claiming Iran had acceded to all his demands. There’s no confusion here, the man is just an idiot.

OPEN THREAD.

[WSJ]

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